Krapp's Last Tape

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1958

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Themes

The Pursuit of Achievement at the Cost of Love

Krapp is a deeply lonely person. As a younger man, he intentionally isolated himself to focus on his work. In his quest for intellectual achievement, he rejected relationships with women as mere distractions from what he believed to be most important in life: serving his own literary aspirations. He pushed people away until he became the bedraggled and miserable person we see at seventy years old. Nearing the end of his life, he is full of regret and self-blame.

Krapp is, however, not altogether certain that he was wrong to sacrifice human connection for the sake of his work. After listening to the tape and calling himself a “stupid bastard,” he also muses that “maybe he was right” in thinking that complicated human relationships were too distracting (10).

The Tyranny of the Body

Krapp’s search for a life of the mind is juxtaposed with the inescapable urges and shortcomings of his physical body. This is most strongly represented in Krapp’s Last Tape by his chronic constipation. This humbling malady always exists alongside his loftier intellectual and spiritual concerns. In the ledger, for instance, he notes an “improvement in bowel condition” right before mentioning the “memorable equinox” when he had his vision at the jetty (5). Krapp’s name itself, a homophone for “crap,” is a blatant reminder of the coarseness of the body.

Deeming it a distraction from the truly important, Krapp tries to reject his sexuality, but is not been able to escape it entirely. As much as he strives to have a “less engrossing sexual life,” Krapp is still subject to sexual urges, recounting a liaison with a “bony old whore” on his last tape and rewinding the old tape twice to listen to his account of lying with his head on a woman’s breasts (6, 11).

Krapp suffers from addiction as well. He eats bananas compulsively, though they worsen his constipation. He is also a longtime heavy drinker. In his twenties, he estimated that he spent as much as 40 percent of his waking life in bars and expressed a desire to quit. As Krapp keeps going backstage for more to drink, it becomes obvious he has not been able to follow through on this resolution. His drinking throughout the play, an attempt to stifle his sense of regret, reveals that his frequent intoxication prevents genuine self-examination. As Krapp’s personality changes with age, his drinking and constipation remain constant.

The title of the play alludes to Krapp’s impending death. When his body dies, his intellectual striving will be completely extinguished.

Fractured Identity

The premise of Krapp’s Last Tape—Krapp listens to a tape on which he recounts listening to another tape of himself, at various points laughing along or disagreeing with it—creates the impression of a splintered personality. For instance, in this excerpt, thirty-nine-year old Krapp mocks the ideas he had in his twenties while older Krapp laughs along in agreement before breaking off to laugh on his own:

“Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp. The voice! Jesus! And the aspirations! [Brief laugh in which Krapp joins.] And the resolutions! [Brief laugh in which Krapp joins.] To drink less, in particular. [Brief laugh of Krapp alone.]” (6).

In this short passage alone, at least three Krapps make an appearance, each with his own internal conflict. Krapp also frequently interrupts and contradicts his own contemporaneous monologue. At various points he says that he is glad to be done with his youth, yet he does not believe his own claims, detecting a “false ring” in them (6). Likewise, he stops himself when he dwells on his lost love and when he considers making a “last effort” (11).

What Krapp wants, what he says he wants, and what he does are disparate. Though he exhorts himself to stop drinking and eating bananas, he does not. In another example of his indecision, he says, “farewell to love,” at thirty-nine, separating from the woman with whom he lay in the boat (5). That same year, he has the epiphany that he believes will bring him comfort in his old age. In his old age, however, he has no recollection of his breakthrough. His intellectual work brings him no fulfillment. On the contrary, he berates himself for giving up love for what he derisively calls his “homework” (10). Ironically, his epiphany seems to be that he should make space for love in his life, but he suppresses or forgets this realization, to his detriment.

The several, slightly different Krapps that appear in the play produce a hall-of-mirrors effect. His identity is not cohesive, but instead comprised of competing, unresolved desires that make it difficult for him to choose what he wants from life and be satisfied with his choices. Ultimately, this expresses a pessimistic view of humans’ ability to make themselves happy.